Weapon failure is highly problematic in itself, without reworking a few other things.A low-tech railgun costs almost nothing, weapon failure is irrelevant. A full-size quad Gauss turret may not even be worth firing against an individual small missile, better to tank the hit.A high-tech laser may not be worth firing at the end of its range, causing more damage to the firing ship on average than to the opponent... but 10 capacitor-1 lasers instead of one capacitor-10 laser incur 10% of the firing costs for a given number of shots.

One of the reasons for the failure mechanic is to prevent extreme kiting. Low-tech railguns will never be able to kite anything, so this is ok in my opinion.The lasers are also fine: 10 lasers require 10 times the space and thus 10 times the number of ships to mount the same weapon strength, which is a lot more production cost.The gauss turret - I guess we will have to see how severe it becomes. Remember though that salvo sizes are not a problem for this anymore, so this only occurs if there really is just one missile approaching, or it is the only missile left of a larger salvo after other weapons have fired.

If it were me I'd probably have the maintenance providers and the MSP manufacturers be separate (or just built by construction factories like ship parts), so you could just ship MSP around, as one resource is even easier than three. But as long as maintenance facilities do both then I agree the mineral change is for the best.

So the new MSP mineral changes are a much welcome one, but it made me wonder if it is possible to reduce this aspect of micro management a little more. Does Aurora C# allow for setting a minimum/maximum/range for mineral storage that will allow for the following to take place?

1. You decide how much of a set mineral you want on a colony2. Allocate a frieghter to work as a conditional order ship (with the conditional being to check mineral amounts)3. The freighter now checks on all the required minerals based on your settings and auto fills from a specified other colony.

One of the major practical game play changes I have found through play-testing C# Aurora is the ease with which new naval bases can be created (because of the new maintenance system).

However, that brings a new issue. As you can no longer build MSP using construction factories in C#, you need to make full use of the MSP production of maintenance facilities or you start to run out of MSP (which is happening to me now because I am not doing that). The reason I am struggling to build MSP at the new bases is that MSP require eight different minerals. 1 MSP costs 0.25 BP and requires the following minerals (in tons): Duranium 0.05, Neutronium 0.025, Tritanium 0.025, Boronide 0.025, Mercassium 0.025, Uridium 0.025, Corundium 0.025, Gallicite 0.05. There is a lot of micromanagement required in either mining those minerals locally or moving them manually (and I keep forgetting which eight minerals ).

Therefore, for game play reasons and my own sanity I've decided to reduce the number of minerals required. I summed all ship components subject to maintenance for all military ships in my current game (including AI) to determine the most common minerals. Duranium and Gallicite were about the same, Uridium was about half of those and everything else was much lower, around one sixth or less of Duranium. Therefore I am going to change MSP minerals to Duranium 0.1, Uridium 0.05, Gallicite 0.1. That is much easier to remember and more reflective of reality. While that does increase overall Duranium consumption a little, I have also changed some buildings to use less Duranium, which I will post about separately.

1. I remember reading that initially you had set the promotion ratio to 2:1 and was discussing at some point to maybe have promotions happen to fill available vacancies. What model did you end up going with? Have you had any trouble filling commander roles?

2. I do also remember reading that you could still manually assign a ship commander above the max rank for the ship, can this still happen?

Mining Hub. When placed on a planet, it will send out small automated mining vessels (mechanics could be similar to mass driver packets, just for fluff and looking cool) to nearby (1m km, upgrades with engine efficiency tech?) asteroids and small moons, slowly harvesting their minerals at a set amount per year. Could scale with the mining techs.

Module/mechanic:

Laboratory module. Make it huge, expensive, crew-intensive and heavy, but I've always wanted to make science vessels. There must be heaps of discoveries waiting to be found in those new star systems, considering the breakthroughs we already made with our limited space exploration IRL. It could allow for a new mechanic, where some planets can spawn with a pool of 'research points' in a specific field. A science vessel could perform research near the planet, then return and offload those research points into a tech currently being researched.